A History of Theater on Cape Cod

By Sue Mellen and Kathi Scrizzi Driscoll

Theater on the Cape began in 1916 when a group of artists and writers in Provincetown mounted a production of a one-act play, Bound East for Cardiff, by a little-known playwright, Eugene O'Neill. They staged the play in a rickety old theater on a wharf in what was then little more than a sleepy fishing village. From that artists' colony--and others like it across the Cape and Islands--it grew into the constantly expanding theater universe it is today. The theatrical descendants of O'Neill and the Provincetown Players continue to present classical drama, contemporary hits and new, experimental works to audiences that have come to expect the best. In her tour of the theaters from Provincetown to Falmouth, author and entertainment columnist Sue Mellen reveals the rich past behind a unique cultural treasure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The History Press
• Release date: Apr 26, 2021
• ISBN: 9781439670200

Sue Mellen

Sue Mellen began her writing career as an arts, entertainment and features writer for the Cape Cod Times. She next went on to work in public relations, first for a regional healthcare system and then for a classic car museum. Then, after a short stint as a freelance business and technology writer, she began a content-creation firm YourWriters, which she still operates to this day. Through her company, she has co-written and ghostwritten numerous books for a wide range of clients. After an extended hiatus, the author has returned to her first love: reviewing the theatrical productions that grace the historic theaters of Cape Cod. Exploring the histories of the theater groups that dot the Cape has been pure joy.

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1

SUN, SURF AND SPOTLIGHTS

THE ENDURING WORLD OF THEATER ON CAPE COD

It’s a summer’s eve on Cape Cod, and up and down the peninsula waves lap steadily against the shore, gulls cry out and children laugh and chatter as they play a never-ending game of tag with the waves and one another. These are the age-old sounds of summer on Olde Cape Cod. (And, okay, let’s face it, there is the modern addition of car engines and horns competing with the sounds of nature for airtime.)

But everywhere up and down and across the Cape are also other sounds that waft through the air throughout the summer season and, increasingly, all year long. These are the soaring sounds of orchestras tuning up for an overture, laughter at flawlessly performed physical comedy, dramatic lines cutting through the air like razor-sharp knives and—everywhere—applause, applause, applause. And here’s maybe the best part: There are no TVs or movie screens involved. These are the sounds of the more than three dozen theater companies that dot Cape Cod and the Islands, as they continue to build the lively, vibrant culture of live theater on the Cape.

A TOUCH OF NEW YORK ON THE DUNES

This may be the best thing about theater on Cape Cod: The theater-going public and critics alike generally agree that it just keeps getting better and better. In fact, theater buffs across the region have come to expect a level of performance expertise usually available only in metropolitan theater centers like New York and San Francisco. All summer long—and in recent years into the off-season—vacationers trek literally from all over the world for a little sun, sand and Sondheim. They know that if they want New York–quality theater without the noise, congestion and gritty summer heat of the city, they will find it in one of the often-historic theaters on Cape Cod. In fact, according to the Cape and Islands Theatre Coalition, which helps keep the public informed of the region’s diverse dramatic offerings, more than six hundred thousand people attend performances on the Cape and Islands every year.

Cape Cod, the home of summer fun and great theater. GoodPhotos.

There are myriad theories about why the Cape has become such a bastion of live theater. Certainly, the sheer power of competition is a major factor. Theater companies—which number upward of thirty on the peninsula at this printing—are all too well aware that on any given summer night theater-lovers have almost endless choices when it comes to the dramatic arts. In the mood for a popular musical filled with young, athletic dancers leaping across the stage? You can find it all year long at the Cape Cod Theatre Company in Harwich or at the Highfield Theatre in Falmouth, where the College Light Opera Company takes to the stage in the summer months and the Falmouth Theatre Guild takes over the venue in the off-season.

If, on the other hand, you’d like something a little more serious and thought-provoking to hit the restart button in your prefrontal lobe, there are likely to be any number of choices at the tip of the Cape, including a Eugene O’Neill play offered by either the Provincetown Theater or Provincetown Dramatic Arts. (How about this for drama: In one recent Dramatic Arts production of the O’Neill play Anna Christie, the massive wooden doors on the wharf theater were opened onto the harbor. Throughout the play, the sea became a living, breathing and omniscient presence. Interestingly, the sea actually made its first appearance as a lead character in the very first staging of O’Neill’s very first play, Bound East for Cardiff, which actually marked the very beginning of American drama as we know it. Of course, no discussion of theater on Cape Cod would be complete without a thorough look at the influence of O’Neill and his contemporaries. I’ll offer that look in chapter 2 and at various junctures throughout the book.)

Your search for drama might also take you the short distance to the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater for a work by a new playwright in the Julie Harris Theater. Or you could travel a little farther up-Cape to the Bayside town of Brewster, where the Cape Cod Repertory Theatre works with professional actors and playwrights to further the group’s commitment to telling great stories. And if you’re up for a little trip across Nantucket Sound, you might catch an original work at the Theatre Workshop of Nantucket, where professional actors often hailing from the Great White Way join with talented locals to produce works that keep alive a thriving island tradition of theater. And, if you happen to be stretching the season into late September and feel like circling back to the tip of the Cape—and to the very beginnings of American drama—you might want to catch a day or two of the Tennessee Williams Festival. There you can catch one of Williams’s works, along with some newer works in the Williams tradition, along with some innovative performance art.

Cape Cod Theatre Company/Home of the Harwich Junior Theatre, Beauty and the Beast, 2018. Cape Cod Theatre Company Staff.

In the mood for a little star power? It’s there at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, the oldest professional summer playhouse in the country at ninety-three at this writing. An almost endless list of Hollywood and Broadway luminaries—including the likes of Gertrude Lawrence, Julie Andrews and Julie Harris—have spent large chunks of summer seasons there. (In Lawrence’s case, the playhouse literally became home. More on that later.) And every season, the playhouse brings in Tony Award–winning talent to continually feed aficionados’ continuing hunger for star power.

And just a couple of towns over in Hyannis is the Melody Tent, which began life as a dramatic arts venue and has evolved into a site for musical entertainment, with a steady stream of noted performers gracing its stage for decades. (One Melody Tent legend says that Bonnie Raitt cut her musical teeth there tagging along with her musical-comedy-star dad, John.) Or you can take another trip toward the tip of the Cape and find stars at the Payomet Arts Center in Truro, which offers a mixed bag of live music, theater and—wait for it—a Cirque du Soleil–style circus experience. Musical performers at Payomet have recently included cultural icons like Arlo Guthrie, Mary Chapin Carpenter and Taj Mahal.

Drawing of the Cape Playhouse. Author’s collection.

Bottom line: Fierce competition virtually defines the theater and live entertainment experience on Cape Cod. But there’s something more: there’s a tradition, a dedication to theater that extends from Provincetown to Falmouth and the Islands and envelops performers and audiences alike. And, maybe more important, literally thousands of actors, directors and technicians feed the well-nourished cultural industry that is Cape Cod theater. Obviously, this virtual obsession had to begin somewhere—and so it did. It began in what was once a quiet little fishing village at the tip of the Cape that became a thriving artists’ colony and to this day is a mecca for writers, visual artists and, of course, playwrights and performers.

So, let’s begin at the beginning—at the land’s end.

AND THEN THERE IS THE HISTORY

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a virtual revolution going on in every area of the arts. Authors like Henry David Thoreau and Henry James and artists like James Whistler in the United States and, of course, Pablo Picasso, Édouard Manet and Claude Monet in Europe, were breaking new artistic ground. In keeping with that revolutionary environment, the genesis of Provincetown (and eventually Cape Cod) as an art colony has its roots in the establishment of the Cape Cod School of Art in 1899 by impressionist painter Charles Webster Hawthorne. As authors of the site I Am Provincetown note, aspiring artists came to his school to learn en plein air, which, as its name implies, focuses on creating works outdoors.

Soon, dozens of artists, writers and playwrights were taking the new railway line to Provincetown to join their revolutionary brothers and sisters. It only seems natural that artists of every kind would come to this spot literally at the end (or beginning) of the Earth to leap into new and uncharted territory.

By the second decade of the new century, expatriates who had traded American soil for the salons and cafés of Europe were fleeing the war on the continent and joining their comrades in artist colonies like Greenwich Village and Provincetown. In fact, the colony became so popular that in 1916 the Boston Globe printed the headline Biggest Art Colony in the World at Provincetown. Artists and writers who lived and worked in New York and Boston in the winter hopped a train for the Cape and wended their way on to Provincetown to create masterpieces amid the dunes. Revolutionaries—both in politics—like Jack Reed and Louise Bryant were among that group. Also among the first settlers of the Provincetown Art Colony were playwrights Susan Glaspell and Eugene O’Neill. Glaspell was responsible for convincing many fellow artists to help her build the new way of life on the Cape. And O’Neill was responsible for, without exaggeration, giving birth to the American theater as we know it today. With a little one-act play first staged in Provincetown, Bound East for Cardiff, and other works that followed, he led the art away from European-style performance to a new, truly American art form.

Poster for the Eugene O’Neill play The Emperor Jones. Courtesy of Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum.

And that, logically enough, is where the story begins. I’ll revisit the beginnings of American (and Cape Cod) theater, then guide the reader through a tour of the land of Mediterranean light and its theater history.

It’s curtain time.

2

PROVINCETOWN

AT THE LAND’S END IS THE BEGINNING

By the second decade of the twentieth century, Provincetown had become a virtual outpost for artists and intellectuals from Greenwich Village. Artists were everywhere—on the beaches, dunes and town streets—working to capture the beauty of the world bathed in the unique Cape Cod light. Among them were several writers and playwrights who were disillusioned by the stodginess and commercialism of Broadway. Until that point, American theater was merely an extension of classical European theater—with a little cheap melodrama and vaudeville thrown in for good measure.

The revolutionaries in Provincetown wanted to smash the classical European mold and create something brand new, something that would appeal to the fishermen who were paying 50 cents a seat, rather than the well-fed audiences on Broadway, says David Drake, current artistic director of the Provincetown Theater. They wanted to know what their own pens could do.

So, in the summer of 1915, a group that included Susan Glaspell (who would go on to win a Pulitzer for drama), and her husband, George Jig Cram Cook, and Neith Boyce and her husband, Hutchins Hapgood, staged an evening of one-act plays at Boyce’s home. The plays Suppressed Desires by Glaspell and Cook and Constancy by Boyce were both witty spoofs and well received among the intellectuals and artists who themselves had come to the end of the world for just this kind of intellectual revolution. Drake points out that the democratic nature of the group extended to their productions; the group took turns producing scripts and acting in one another’s plays.

So the group planned another staging of the plays, this time in an old fish house on Lewis Wharf in Provincetown’s East End, offered to the group by Mary Heaton Vorse, a journalist, novelist, social critic and activist who maintained lifelong ties to the art community on the tip of the Cape. In fact, she—along with Glaspell and other artists/activists including Jack Reed and Louise Bryant—were among the first to put down roots in Ptown. In the early years of the colony, Vorse was influential in convincing many of her fellow artists to trade the confines of New York for the freedom of Cape Cod. Fittingly, she died in her home in Provincetown in 1966 at the age of ninety-two. Her book Time and the Town is still a Bible for Ptown lovers.

Playbill from Wharf Theatre. Courtesy of Pilgrim Monument and Provincetown Museum.

Throughout the winter of 1915–16, enthusiasm remained high and a second season was planned for the old wharf building—which was now outfitted with a makeshift theater. It’s interesting to note